Today, we’ll take a look at NOTAM’s with an excerpt from Bob Gardner’s textbook The Complete Private Pilot. For all of the regulations pertaining to aviation, check out our annual FAR/AIM series.
Information that might affect the safety of a flight, such as a runway closure, Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR), NAVAID outage, lighting system change, etc., is available from your flight service station briefer.
Your briefer has access to NOTAMs. So do you, at PilotWeb. If you use one of the computer flight planning products such as DUATS or the AOPA flight planner, you will also receive current NOTAMS—but be aware that TFRs can pop up without warning. Always check for them with flight service before takeoff to avoid being intercepted by F-16s or Coast Guard helicopters and forced to land.
If you want to know about VOR outages, runway closures, men and equipment on the runway, etc., look for or ask for D NOTAMs. For long cross-countries it is always valuable to call one of the fixed-base operators at the destination airport for last-minute information, such as “the power is out and we can’t pump gas!”
To make it easier for pilots to scan through a list of NOTAMs for information specific to their flight, the FAA uses “key words” in the first line of text. See the figure below—although this FAA document does not include recent additions: ODP, SID, STAR, CHART, DATA, IAP, VFP, ROUTE, SPECIAL, or (O); also, the keyword RAMP will no longer be used. As a VFR pilot, you are definitely interested in Visual Flight Procedure (VFP) and Obstacle Departure Procedure (ODP) NOTAMs which, although intended for instrument pilots, might contain information useful to you.
Every 28 days the FAA releases the Notices to Air Missions publication that contains all current NOTAM (D)s and FDC NOTAMs, except for Temporary Flight Restrictions. When a NOTAM is published here (or in the Chart Supplements U.S.) it no longer shows up on the briefer’s screen; if you don’t ask the briefer for any published NOTAMs that will affect your flight, you will never find out about them. You can get this publication online at https://pilotweb.nas.faa.gov/PilotWeb/.
